Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
I Agree with Graham Hancock!? -Modern Myth Moment - I
288 Plays5 years ago
Ok, before you type your strongly worded tweet or you decide to #cancel me please give me a moment to explain. As has been highlighted recently, archaeology has a problem with impact with getting the information out there. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with the food, its just the service isn’t what you want. With his new book released graham hancock appeared on the Joe Rogan show and obviously talked at length about his book, he made some salient points and importantly he tied himself to those ideas and that’s where I think we can learn something about outreach.If you want to argue, tweet at me or send me an email:Links Twitter/IG - @anarchaeologistSupport the network by becoming a memberShare this on social media
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Controversial Theories
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the archaeology podcast level. I call upon my ancestors to judge me and my clan.
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to Modern Myth Moments. Little snippets and ideas brought to you by The Anarchologist. That's me. And today's topic I want to briefly talk about. Somebody who's not widely respected in a lot of archaeological circles, but he's doing something right.
Graham Hancock's 'Mother Culture' Theory
00:00:47
Speaker
I'm talking about Mr Graham Hancock, British journalist and writer, who is widely maligned in both archaeological and sceptic circles. His 1995 book, Fingerprints of the Gods, made the claim that there was some highly advanced civilisation, which ended up being the so-called mother culture of all civilisations throughout the earth.
00:01:16
Speaker
Obviously DNA studies, linguistic studies, and just our understanding of how populations work mean that this idea of a highly advanced civilisation being the mother culture is not really where the evidence points.
00:01:33
Speaker
But, for some reason, Graham Hancock has his fans, and a lot of them.
Popularity vs Truth in Archaeology
00:01:39
Speaker
And he seems to be much more able to pick up new fans and get people interested than many of other archaeologists with their facts and their evidence and their research. The question is, do we actually even need to be right for people to get interested in what we're doing?
00:02:01
Speaker
With the release of his newest book, Graham Hattoncock went on the Joe Rogan podcast, which as we know is a very respectable news outlet to be on. And what's quite interesting here is that in amongst everything, one of the things that I find most profound, what's the following thing?
Exploring Human Connections Beyond Nationalism
00:02:25
Speaker
I know this is not a comment that will go down well with many people, but I am strongly opposed to nationalism. I don't see any virtue in nationalism. It is an accident of birth, which nation you were born in. It was nothing that you did for your own merit. You didn't earn that. You were born by accident in a particular nation.
00:02:47
Speaker
And this is something that I strongly agree with. I do not believe that nationalism is something that we need to galvanize ourselves around. I think the idea of nationalism is inherently one that puts out other people, and for no good reason.
00:03:06
Speaker
But interestingly enough, I still don't agree with Graham Hancock's wider premise on the mother culture because the evidence really isn't there. However, what Graham here is saying is he's talking about something that people want to hear. They want to know that it's okay to be this similar to other people. And he goes on.
00:03:33
Speaker
that we are all one family, that humans are intimately interconnected all around the world, that you can go to the remotest area of the Amazon jungle and find the same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams that we have in industrialized cities shared by the hunter-gatherers in the middle of the Amazon.
00:03:51
Speaker
similarities as human beings and what we share in common at the emotional level and the level of love and at the level of heart are far more important than our differences that are defined by the nation or the political group in which we grew up.
00:04:06
Speaker
Graham here is making a very very good point and I think we should be prepared to say when people we don't like or we wish would put their ideas differently we need to acknowledge that sometimes they do hit the mark and I think it is very important that people realize that
00:04:28
Speaker
humans are of the same species, that the differences between us are nominal, superficial. And what hopefully will happen is that more people will question things like race, like gender, things that nominally separate us, but don't actually have a lot of physical or biological meaning.
00:04:54
Speaker
So I think this is, on the whole, very, very good. I'm glad that Graham is out there talking like this with the following.
Minimal Governance and Political Critique
00:05:04
Speaker
I mean, he could easily, easily go into right-wing hackery and talk about the biological human biodiversity, but he doesn't. He actually does the opposite. And for that, I commend him. However, there are a few things that I don't 100% agree with him.
00:05:24
Speaker
When I say I'm against nationalism, I need also to make clear that does not mean, and I hope I'm not taken out of context by others who are listening to this, that does not mean I'm in favor of world government. I detest governments.
00:05:39
Speaker
That's another thing we need to grow out of. We don't need governments anymore. If we have them, they should have a very minimal role in our society. I think it's possible for the human race to relate as one family without leaders and governments who are exploiting the worst aspects of our character, the lowest common denominator of our society, deliberately encouraging fears and hatreds and suspicions. What responsible leaders should be doing is encouraging love and unity and their failure to do that
00:06:08
Speaker
in my view, disqualifies them from the leadership role entirely. And that's why I've often said, I would like to see a situation in which no head of state can be appointed to that position unless he or she has first had 12 sessions of ayahuasca. That would be the condition.
00:06:28
Speaker
don't even bother applying for the job if you haven't done this. And we have to be there while you have it. And we have to be, we want to see that you're drinking every drop. And we want an experienced shaman present who's really going to guide you through the journey. And I suspect that that would be a transformative experience for many of our political class. So here Graham is talking about
00:06:52
Speaker
giving politicians a bad trip and hopefully in that they will rediscover themselves. Arawara, I'm not really very good at pronouncing it, has the active ingredient DMT, which is hallucinogenic, it's a psychotropic drug that apparently offers mind-altering experiences.
00:07:15
Speaker
Now, what I find very interesting here is that Graham Hancock is talking about basically anarchist principles.
Criticism of Hancock's Methodology
00:07:22
Speaker
I mean like, hey Comrade, Comrade Hancock, get on board!
00:07:29
Speaker
What's interesting is that within this, Graham doesn't seem to talk about any materiality. So my biggest criticism of Graham Hancock is that while a lot of the time the political class and who we call politicians and those in power do exploit people, that exploitation is very much tied to how people exist in an economy.
00:07:56
Speaker
So it's very difficult to say that somebody's being exploited politically without acknowledging that because they have to work for wage, they're also being exploited. I mean, one forms the other. The idea that, for example,
00:08:11
Speaker
politics is devoid from economics, that politics can never have an effect on economics. It's a bit superficial and naive. And this is where I think Graham could kind of maybe do some reading. But on the whole, what does Graham actually do here as an individual?
00:08:34
Speaker
He's not really talking about his book in this bit. He doesn't need to talk about what his research is about. He doesn't need to talk about the facts that he's brought up. Instead, he makes conversation about what he believes, what he's passionate about. Now, interestingly enough, his ideas about the mother culture, about everybody coming from the same stock,
00:09:02
Speaker
does lead itself to kind of argue that we aren't so different from one another, which I think is a good thing. Especially in the sense that we are being split up along different economic lines, racial lines, national lines. I think it's important to have this. But what's the point in talking about what Graham Hancock has to say on the Joe Rogan podcast?
Passion vs Facts in Archaeology Outreach
00:09:30
Speaker
I'll tell you what the point is, the point is that archaeology right now is not engaging with people properly, it's not providing the passionate people for people to follow.
00:09:41
Speaker
I mean, we wonder why people don't care about facts, they don't care about evidence, they don't care about research because nobody cares about that. That's the thing, that's the paradigm shift. You know, you don't need to be good at, you don't need to have the facts to win the debate. The fact, the thing is that I'm not asking people to throw research facts and things out the window, I'm asking them to be more honest.
00:10:10
Speaker
For me, archaeology and history has to have a disruptive element to it. It has to disrupt the common narrative. Because history itself is what we've ground ourselves in. But at the same time, it's made up of all the weird psychotic ideas that we have about ourselves as a society.
00:10:37
Speaker
History is disconnected. It's all over the place. There's no narratives anymore. Instead there are all these bits of information floating about the place.
00:10:49
Speaker
And to make sense of it all, you need stuff that is, that just makes intuitive sense, or at least sounds like it makes intuitive sense. And that's what Graham is offering. Not only is offering that, but he's offering somebody you can get behind, somebody who's passionate, somebody who's willing to talk about why they do what they do.
00:11:12
Speaker
And he doesn't need to connect it to that research directly. He doesn't need to talk about his book in this instance, but yet this is what makes him relatable. And I think that's possibly something archeology can learn from, that when we interact with the public at large, we have to be characters, we have to show ourselves.
00:11:39
Speaker
We cannot be simply talking about the facts and the research without any of the other context, without any of the other character or the epheness.
00:11:52
Speaker
The fact is, I want history to dethrone the victor. That's why I care about history, that's why I care about archaeology.
Archaeology's Role in Challenging Norms
00:12:01
Speaker
Because I see it as a means of disrupting the idea that the people at the top of society deserve to be there, or have earned their way there.
00:12:11
Speaker
I want archaeology to disrupt the idea that capitalism is a natural state of humanity, when in fact it was a series of separate choices that became capitalism. These are really interesting and important things, because they make us look at the world in a different way.
00:12:34
Speaker
So what I want you to go away and do is when you write your outreach, when you do your outreach, I want you to become part of that as well because I think that you guys and gals and everyone else are such great ambassadors for archaeology. I see it every single day and I want to see more of it.
00:12:56
Speaker
Anyway, that's the Modern Myth moment.
Engaging Public with Passionate Outreach
00:12:59
Speaker
With me, an archaeologist, this show, along with all the other shows in the Archaeology Podcast Network, are members supported with listeners like you. So if you wanna go to our podnet and click on the members area, you can sign up to our membership. We've got three different tiers with lots of goodies for our pro and supporting members. So go and check it out, support us and help us kind of spread the messages like these.
00:13:24
Speaker
and obviously share with your friends on social media and be passionate.
00:13:54
Speaker
Modern myth, modern myth, modern myth It's a modern myth, oh yeah Modern myth, modern myth, modern myth It's a modern myth, oh yeah It's a modern myth, oh yeah